


whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth

by laiqualaurelote



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Case Fic, F/M, Fake Character Death, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Sexual Harassment, Implied/Referenced Suicide, London, Murder, Murder Mystery, Serial Killers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:48:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25784668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laiqualaurelote/pseuds/laiqualaurelote
Summary: "You could have shot me," Rey tells him severely."Not likely." Kylo puts down the crossbow, takes a pair of calipers out and begins to measure the radiation of the cracks. "I have excellent aim."Rey rolls her eyes and goes into the kitchen to put down the groceries.In need of somewhere to stay in London, Rey winds up sharing a flat at 221B Baker Street with a madman who claims to be the world's only consulting detective. A Sherlock AU
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 193
Kudos: 403





	1. The Adventure of the Engineering Student's Room

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now with moodboard by [@Erulisse17](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erulisse17)!

Rey walks in through the door with the groceries to Kylo levelling a crossbow at her.

"Wh - " says Rey. Before she can finish her breath, Kylo fires. The bolt buries itself in the wood of the door next to her head.

The Rey of a year ago would have exploded, broken down, hurled the groceries at him. The Rey of today simply closes her eyes, takes a calming breath, and says: "Where did you get that?"

"It's on loan from the British Museum," says Kylo, coming over to inspect the bolt in the door. "Well, sort of. I'll give it back." 

"You could have shot me," Rey tells him severely.

"Not likely." Kylo takes a pair of calipers out and begins to measure the radiation of the cracks. "I have excellent aim." 

Rey rolls her eyes and goes into the kitchen to put down the groceries. 

“It’s as I thought,” says Kylo from the door. “The murder weapon is a 15th-century crossbow. Besides this one, there are only five others in the country; it’s only a matter of tracing them.”

“And you got that just from the cracks in the door,” says Rey. 

“It did take me all night to narrow it down to crossbows,” says Kylo. “And all morning to borrow this one. I’ll have to return it later.” He looks meaningfully at her.

“Right,” says Rey, staring at the crossbow.

Kylo holds it out to her. “You know you want to.”

“I do not!”

“Maz won’t mind.”

There comes the sound of a cane thumping against the underside of their floorboards, followed by a muffled “I heard that, you little shit!”

“Come on,” says Kylo, and places the crossbow in Rey’s hands. 

It’s heavier than it looks. Rey stares as if hypnotised as Kylo’s hands close over hers, racks the lever back, raises the crossbow to aim at the door. He has come up behind her for this, one hand at her elbow, his breath ghosting the tip of her ear. “Sight,” she hears him say. “Breathe in. Let it go.”

Rey pulls the trigger, a millisecond before Poe Dameron walks in the door.

Poe turns to stare at the bolt buried in the door inches from his face, then at the two of them. “Have I caught you at a bad time?”

“Hardly,” says Kylo. His hand is still at her elbow. “What is it, Inspector?”

Poe runs his hand through his curls, clearly debating whether or not he should comment on the crossbow. He decides against it. “There’s a new body.”

“Splendid,” says Kylo. He steps away. “Coming, Rey?”

Rey sighs. “What do you think?”

*

One year ago, Rey was homeless and on Craigslist.

"Can't afford that," she said, clicking through posts. "Or that. Or that. God, why are rents in central London so ridiculous?"

“You could stay with us,” offered Rose. “We have the room.”

By ‘room’, she meant the space in between her bed and Paige’s, which was just about wide enough to fit Rey in her sleeping bag if she didn’t thrash too much at night. 

“It’s very kind of you two, but I should really get my own place.” Though how she was to do that on her meagre savings and part-time income from the garage seemed impossible. She supposed she could defer a year, but then she would lose her scholarship.

Rose pointed at a post that seemed near miraculous. “Are you serious? That rent for Marylebone? They’ve got to be joking.”

Rey scrolled through the listing. 1Br/1Ba, walking distance from the Tube. “Looks legit. D’you think it’s a scam?”

“Not a lot of details,” mused Rose. “Those are some really terrible photos, it’s like they’re not even trying. Are those holes in the wall?”

“Watch out for psychopaths!” came Paige’s voice from the kitchen. 

“No harm calling.” Rey got out her phone and punched in the number on the listing. It rang so many times she nearly hung up, but then someone answered.

“Hi,” said Rey. “I’m calling about the flatshare - ”

“What?” shouted the person on the other end. “I’m in the middle of something here.”

He had a very deep voice, but other than that it was almost impossible to hear him over the ratcheting, grinding sound in the background. "Wait," said Rey, "is that a chainsaw?" Warning bells were going off in her head. Had she called some psycho killer madhouse?

The sound stopped. "Yes," said the person, and there was now a note of curiosity in his voice. "You could tell?"

"Well, yes," said Rey, "I know what a chainsaw sounds like." 

"Interesting," said the person. "Can you tell what model it is?"

"Um." Rey had no idea why this might be of any importance, but. "Turn it on again?"

"I'm putting you on loudspeaker," said the person. There were some fumbling sounds, and then the chainsaw sounded again, disturbingly close to the phone. Rey listened for the catches in its roar, for the rattle of teeth. "It's a Ryobi. A two-cycle one, long blade - fourteen inches?"

The chainsaw was turned off. "Sixteen inches," said the voice. "But not far off. Impressive. Come by at 4pm."

"Uh, okay," said Rey, non-plussed. She had nothing else on her schedule all day except getting herself re-homed. "Wait - what's the address?"

"221B Baker Street," he said, and hung up.

Paige stuck her head out of the kitchen. “Psychopaths, Rey,” she said, warningly.

“I know,” said Rey hopelessly, “but I have to try.”

*

Turning onto Baker Street, it was not hard to tell which one 221B was. Rey figured it was the one with furniture being chucked out of its window.

She sidled up cautiously as a sideboard went crashing onto the pavement, barely missing the ginger man standing on the street, cursing apoplectically. “ _Fuck you, Ren!_ ” 

The only answer was a desk lamp, which the ginger man dove to catch, whereupon several volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica landed on him. 

“Excuse me,” said Rey, reaching down to help him up, “is this 221 Baker Street?”

The ginger man shook her off. “You’re the new one? By God, he moves fast.” There was such vehemence in his voice that Rey involuntarily took a step back. “You should stay away from him. A fucking psychopath. You won’t last a week.”

He straightened his collar, picked up the military history books, readjusted his grip on the desk lamp and marched off down the street with as much dignity as the situation offered.

Rey swallowed and knocked on the blue door.

It was opened by a short, wizened woman in a kaftan and enormous pebble glasses. “Yes?” she said irritably.

“I’m here for a flat viewing,” said Rey, pasting on a bright smile. “221B?”

The woman rolled her eyes and rapped on the wall with a cane. “Knock it off, you’ve got a visitor!” she bellowed up the stairs. Then she jerked her head towards a door at the top. “Second floor. I’d be ready to duck on entry if I were you.”

Nothing came flying at Rey as she opened the door, flinching as she did. There was a figure standing at the window - towering, rather, he was so broad he almost blocked out the light. He was wearing black and seemed to be staring intently at the street, as if contemplating when to drop the shoe-tree in his hands.

Rey cleared her throat and said: “ _Hello_!” loudly, to alert him of her presence.

He dropped the shoe-tree - it went _clonk_ on the pavement outside - and turned around. Rey’s eyes went instantly to the scar carved across his face. “Great, you’re here.” He gestured at a table in the kitchen. Rey saw that it was covered in chainsaws, at least a dozen. “Have a listen and tell me what you think.”

“What?”

He opened up his laptop and hit play. The tinny sound of a chainsaw reverberated through the flat.

“Is that a snuff film?” Rey demanded. Paige might be right after all, although if this man was a psychopath, he was certainly a very unsubtle one.

“Not technically speaking,” said her new acquaintance, dropping into an armchair. “The person was already dead by the time the chainsaw was used. This is just the dismemberment. Do you need me to play the recording again?”

“I thought I was here for a flat viewing.”

“Well, the flat’s going to be here all day, but I do need to solve this crime in - ” he glanced at the clock over the mantelpiece “ - the next twenty minutes, so. Tick tock.”

Rey went over to the table of chainsaws and studied them. “Play it again.”

He obliged. She picked three of the chainsaws and put them on the floor in the sitting room. Then she carefully cranked and started each one, letting it run for a few seconds. He watched her speculatively from the armchair.

“Again,” she said.

She listened to the recording a third time, then pointed at the chainsaw in the middle.

“The Makita,” he said approvingly. “Thank you.” He grabbed his phone and began composing a message.

Rey stood awkwardly in the sitting room, surrounded by chainsaws. “Um. Can I take a look around?”

“Sure,” he said, not looking up.

Rey carefully put the chainsaws back on the table - health and safety did not seem a top priority in this flat - and did a circuit of the sitting room, which was a haphazard jumble of books and, oddly, what looked like medieval weaponry. The holes in the wall that Rose had spotted in the Craigslist photos seemed to have been made by bullets, which had been dug out but not plastered over. Most of the kitchen had been converted into a laboratory, in which unidentifiable substances were bubbling and being distilled. There was a skull above the fireplace. Rey bent down to inspect it. 

“Who is this?” she asked.

“My grandfather. Don’t touch him.”

Rey snatched her hand away hastily and went to look in the bedrooms. One was an utter mess and seemed to contain only black outfits - she figured this was his - and the other was bare, besides a stripped bed and an empty wardrobe.

“I threw all of Hux’s things out,” he said from behind her, making her jump. For such a big man, he moved very quietly. “But if you want any of it, I suggest you go get it from the pavement before he comes back.”

“It’s fine,” said Rey. “I don’t fancy meeting him again. You’re assuming I want to take the flat.”

“You’re desperate,” he said, leaning against the doorframe and crossing his arms. “You need somewhere to stay. I don’t imagine you like trespassing on your friends’ generosity.”

“You don’t _know_ anything about me or my friends - ” she began hotly, thinking about Rose and Paige taking down the address, making her promise to call by 4.30pm, “just so we know you’re okay.”

“That jacket isn’t yours,” he said. “It’s too big around the shoulders and you’re careful about what you lean against - ergo, a loan, most likely from the woman I heard in the background when you were on the phone with me earlier. You’ve got grease under your fingernails, so you work with machines, and you have an encyclopaedic knowledge of chainsaws, so you’re good at your work, but you came on short notice during a weekday, so not full-time. You can’t afford central London but you’re still trying, so I’m guessing student, some kind of engineering degree from the looks of you. And given how you’ve met Hux, tested chainsaws, seen my grandfather’s skull and haven’t run out screaming, you really need somewhere to stay right now and will put up with a lot for it. Which makes me wonder, how far did your last landlord have to go before you wouldn’t put up with him any more? How much of a creep was he?”

Rey gaped at him. Eventually, she said: “He had an extra key. I knew he was entering the flat without asking me first. Once he let himself in when I was sleeping and I woke to find him standing over me.”

“And then what did you do?” 

“I showed him the Leatherman I sleep with under my pillow.”

“Leatherman’s a good choice of knife,” he said. “How do you feel about the violin?”

Rey knew nothing about the violin. “It sounds all right, I guess?”

“You’ll be hearing a lot of it. I play when I’m thinking, which is always. Also I keep body parts in the fridge. Not at the moment - ” as Rey’s eyes slid in that direction “ - but I have a spleen arriving on Friday. If that bothers you, you’ll need to get your own fridge, though heaven knows where we’ll find room to plug it in.”

“I don’t even - ”

“Maz will settle the tenancy agreement for you. Get the keys from her when you come back with your things.”

“I don’t even know your name,” said Rey.

“Oh, right. I forget not everyone has all the information all of the time.” He strode out, grabbing a scarf and dark peacoat from the rack by the door as he went. “You can call me Kylo Ren. I’m a consulting detective.”

“Wait!” Rey dashed out of the room that was now hers, almost tripping over a fencing foil - this place _was_ a mess. “You’re leaving? Just like that?”

“Got a message. Crime scene to get to.” He paused and turned to consider her, a speculative gleam in his eye.

“What?” She shifted uneasily under his gaze.

“You’re a mechanic, aren’t you? This body was found under a car by the side of the road with _no markings on it whatsoever_ , isn’t that exciting?”

“I think the word you’re looking for is _morbid_.”

“If you say so. Want to come?”

“Hell,” said Rey. It wasn’t like she had a lot of stuff to move anyway. “Why not?”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This began because I wanted to write bizarre roommate fic. There's a plot in there somewhere but I'm not sure if I want to pursue it where it's going. What do you all think?


	2. The Man with the Twisted Scar

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everyone in this fic is British because it just makes life easier for me.

“So,” says Finn, “how’s the madhouse these days?”

“It’s all right,” says Rey. “He punched another hole in the wall on Monday because they wouldn’t expedite shipping for his new titration set. We had words. Then he said he’d steal a minor Degas to cover the hole, because he knows I like Degas, and now I’m just trying to make sure he doesn’t actually.”

“Wow,” says Finn. “He has mellowed.”

Rey and Finn met at Rey’s fourth crime scene, at which Kylo had snapped at Finn for preventing him from walking off with the victim’s toenail clippings and Rey had laid into Kylo for not letting people just do their jobs and made him file a request to examine the toenails at the mortuary. Subsequently she and Finn discovered that they had overlapped, if briefly, in their time at the Peckham Youth Home. Since then they have become conversational acquaintances. Rey likes to think they might even be friends.

Now, they watch Kylo storm around the opulent living room of the Belgravia townhouse, coat flaring. He is engaged in a shouting match with Poe, who looks like he is trying to lift himself by the roots of his hair. 

“No,” Poe says, “absolutely not, there is no way I am letting you interview _a minor_ \- ”

“But she could have seen something that it wouldn’t have occurred to you morons to ask about - ”

“You won’t even tell us _why_ it’s important to the case - ”

“Why bother?” retorts Kylo. “Your minds move so slowly, there’s no point expecting any of you to keep up.”

Finn raises an eyebrow at Rey, who sighs. “And he was doing so well.”

“Want to jump in?”

“Nah,” says Rey. “Let them get out of their system, it’ll be good for them.”

“You can’t seriously expect me to let you near a child, Ben.”

Kylo stiffens. Poe seems to realise his mistake. “Sorry - ”

“I told you not to call me that,” says Kylo, stony.

“Yeah,” says Poe. “Fuck. Forgot. It’s been a long day. But just think about it, you’re not - you’re not _great_ with kids, and she’s just become an orphan - ”

Kylo’s shoulders tense. Rey sees it from across the room. She knows he wants to turn and look at her, but he’s forcing himself not to, and there’s a small part of her that hearkens to that gesture even as she feels the familiar sorrow wash over her, the knowledge that somewhere in this house is a little girl who this morning watched her parents carted out the door in body bags.

“I’ll go with him,” she says. “I’ll do the talking.”

Poe runs his fingers through his hair, harried. “It’s not protocol, Rey. You’re not on the force, you’re - ” He waves vaguely, which just about sums up Rey’s status as whatever she is professionally to Kylo. Assistant? Companion? Sidekick?

“She’s my partner,” says Kylo. Their eyes meet across the gilded room. “Whatever access I have, she has. That was the deal.”

Poe sighs. “Fine. Five minutes, tops. Sergeant, go with them, make sure he says nothing...untoward.”

“Yes, sir,” says Finn, straight-faced. 

The girl is upstairs in her bedroom, kept company by Sergeant Pava, who raises an eyebrow at their arrival but is quelled by a look from Finn. Kylo stays in the doorway. Rey goes over to the fluffy pink bed and kneels at its foot.

“Oona,” she says quietly, “my name’s Rey, that’s my friend Kylo over there.” Kylo nods awkwardly in their direction. “We’re so sorry about your parents.”

“When are they coming back?” Oona wants to know. She’s six. They’re still trying to contact her next-of-kin, who so far seem to be the aunt and uncle on a skiing jaunt in Biarritz. They’ll be a while coming to get her. Rey wants to fold Oona in her arms and tell her everything will be all right, but it won’t be and she can’t, so she folds her hands in her lap instead and says: “They’re not coming back, sweetheart. They’re gone.”

Oona bites her lip and looks away.

“But we’ll find who did this to them,” Rey says. “Oona, will you help us?”

Oona looks mutely at her. Then she nods, slowly.

“We’re going to play a game,” says Rey. “We’re all going to walk around the house, very quietly, and Kylo’s going to point at things. If they have moved from where they were yesterday, can you give us a nod?”

“Okay,” says Oona, her voice a whisper.

They move around the house in an odd procession. Kylo points at the sideboard, the piano and an armchair, all of which Oona shakes her head at. Then he points at a bureau in the corner of the living room. Oona squints at it for a while. Then she nods. 

Kylo pads over to the bureau. Silently, he lowers himself to the floor and inspects it. Then he gets to his feet, crosses to Poe and says in an undertone: “Take the girl back upstairs.”

Poe signals to Jessika Pava, who takes Oona’s hand and leads her back out. Kylo takes Rey by the shoulders and positions her behind the door. “What are we doing?” whispers Rey. 

“Improvising,” says Kylo under his breath. He casts around, picks up the poker from the fireplace. Then he strides over to the bureau, climbs on top of it and uses the poker to knock open the ceiling vent above it. 

“Hello there,” he says into the vent.

Someone comes tumbling out of the vent in a gust of foul air and torn crisp packets. He knocks Kylo off the bureau and they go crashing to the carpeted floor. Rey can’t really see from her vantage point what happens there, but there’s the sound of grappling, and then the person hiding in the vent is up and making a dash for the open door.

Rey slams the door into him so hard he falls over. Finn is on him a second later, already giving him the caution.

Poe massages his temples. “How long was he in the vents?”

“Whole day, from the smell of it,” says Kylo from the floor. He is bleeding slightly from a gash on his forehead, but he looks as chipper as she’s ever seen him get. “He was planning to hide in there for as long as it took and make a run for it when the crime scene was clear. It’s a drop from the vent to the floor, so he had to move one piece of furniture. I just needed Oona to tell me which one.”

“And you couldn’t have given me a heads up?”

“Couldn’t risk spooking him.” Kylo gets to his feet, dusting himself off. “Don’t worry, you can take all the credit, as always.”

Poe masters the internal scream clearly rising within him and goes to help Finn with the arrest.

“How did you know I’d know what to do?” says Rey as they head to the front door. “I could have botched it, for all you know.”

“I hate having to explain things,” says Kylo. “It’s so tedious.”

Rey rolls her eyes. “Well, sorry I asked.”

“No, that’s not what I mean,” says Kylo. “I don’t have to explain things to you. Later, yes, you always have a frightful amount of questions, but not when it matters. You just know what to do.”

“Well,” says Rey lightly, “we can’t all be doing the overthinking round here, can we?” She hands him a tissue. "Cut."

He claps the tissue to the bleeding cut on his forehead as they step out into the light drizzle of the afternoon and hail a cab back to Baker Street. 

*

Rey lasted longer than a week, as Hux had predicted, but it was a near thing.

“There’s mould in the fridge,” she said on the third day. “Why is there mould in the fridge?”

“Experiment,” said Kylo, from where he was wearing safety goggles and setting something on fire, as one did.

“It’s near my casserole.”

“Is it touching it?”

“Almost.”

“Move the casserole, will you? It’ll skew the experiment.”

Rey grit her teeth and moved her casserole to a different shelf. She checked the milk and found it unexpectedly light.

“Have you been drinking my milk?”

“No,” said Kylo, tossing flaming strips of whatever into the sink. “I don’t drink milk.”

“Kylo.”

Kylo sighed. “I did use some in an experiment.”

Rey narrowed her eyes. “Without asking?”

“It was urgent,” said Kylo remorselessly. “I’ll get you more.” He did not.

By day five, Rey did not know any more about the violin than before, but she did know now that she bore it a grudge.

“Can you knock it off for an hour?” she yelled across the room. “I’m trying to write an essay!”

The playing stopped. “I told you about the violin. You said it was okay.”

“I had never heard a violin played live before that day,” Rey informed him, “but now every time I see one I want to rip out its strings and burn it on the rubbish heap.”

Kylo’s eyes flared. “You’re not that charming a flatmate either, I’ll have you know.”

“What?” shouted Rey. “What do I do?”

“Well, for a start, you shed all this hair. It clogs up the shower drain.”

“I shed _hair_? You shed _broken glass_.”

Kylo sniffed and returned to playing the violin in an unnecessarily high key.

“Oh no you don’t.” Rey dug through her room until she found the cheap speakers Rose had passed down to her. She plugged them into her laptop, went on YouTube, found a Taylor Swift album and turned the volume up to maximum.

“ _I PROMISE THAT YOU’LL NEVER FIND ANOTHER LIKE ME -_ ”

She looked up to see Kylo storming over to her. He looked so livid that Rey thought him half-minded to stab her with the bow, and with her signature disregard for self-preservation, she lifted her chin and glared back at him. They stayed there for a few tense breaths, him looming over her with a muscle working in his jaw, Taylor Swift warbling ear-splittingly. Then abruptly he flung himself into his room, the door slamming.

Rey stared after him in shock, until she became dimly aware of a hammering on the door. 

It was Maz. “Think you’ve proved your point, child,” she said, not unkindly, “but can you turn it off now? Can’t abide that modern pop.”

On day ten, Rey got home from her shift at the garage bone-tired and not in the least prepared to deal with the readings she needed to get through before the next day’s seminar. Kylo was preparing to head out when she entered. “No, don’t take off your coat,” he said peremptorily. “There’s been a robbery on Bond Street.”

Rey rubbed at her eyes. She was so sleepy it was a miracle she had not missed her Tube stop. “And that concerns me how?”

“Thought you’d be interested to see how they got through the display window.”

Rey began unwinding her scarf. “Not now, Kylo. I’m knackered.”

“I could use your eye.”

Rey began to feel tendrils of irritation creeping up her skin. “I don’t have time to run around after you and whatever it is you’re playing at.”

Kylo stopped. “It’s not playing,” he said. “It’s my work.”

“And I’ve got work too,” Rey shot back, “which I’ve been hard at all afternoon, because unlike some people, I don’t _have_ rich parents who fund my posh apartment so I can take off to play detective whenever I like!”

And she had all of three seconds to regret what had come out of her mouth before he looked at her, head cocked to one side, and said coldly, “No, I don’t imagine so. You don’t _have_ parents to speak of, do you?”

And of course he knew, even though she’d never told him about her parents. Never told him about the unforgivable holes in her memory where their faces should be, snatches of song, supermarket trolley wheels grinding on gravel, satsuma juice, the sound of someone crying far away. Of course he knew, because he knew everything.

“No,” her voice shaking, “no, you don’t get to talk about that.”

“I could find them,” he went on, mercilessly. “It wouldn’t be too difficult for me. But you don’t want them found, do you? Because you don’t want to know how they could have left you.”

It was not fair that he could know this so easily. Was it written on her face, in her habit of picking at her nails, the way she spoke or ate or cried? He hadn’t seen her cry yet, and he wasn’t about to. Rey pushed past him, vision blurring. She heard him call her name as she fled down the steps and out into the street.

She walked without taking note of where she was going. It came to her, distantly, that she had left her scarf and keys in the flat, and that now she would probably have to ask him to let her back in, Maz being away this weekend. _I would rather die,_ thought Rey hotly. And then, _where am I?_

She was on Hallam Street. Rey fumbled for her phone to see where the nearest Tube station was - perhaps she could trespass on Rose and Paige’s hospitality for just one more night - when she suddenly became aware of the car following her.

It was a black Audi and it was inching along after her casually, as if it were in neutral gear and just rolling along. Rey watched, eyes narrowed, as it came to a stop under a lamppost. She was suddenly, keenly aware that the street was otherwise deserted.

She expected a man to step out of the car, but it was a young woman in an ash-grey suit, blonde hair coiled in elaborate braids atop her head. She looked bored. “Miss Irena Watson?” she said, as if she was a shop cashier asking if you wanted a bag with that. 

“What’s it to you?” Rey demanded.

“The director will see you now,” said the woman, and gestured meaningfully at the open door. 

“What the hell?” Rey took a step back. “I’m not getting into that car! You back the fuck off!” 

The woman sighed. “Miss Watson, if you’ll just come along calmly - ”

“No!” Rey began screaming at the top of her lungs. “Help! Help!”

“Oh god,” said the woman with feeling.

“Kaydel!” 

A woman in her late 50s had got out of the car. She was in a white suit so sharp it didn’t look like it’d survive a second on a London street. “Ma’am?” said the young woman, alarmed.

“Kaydel, what _are_ you doing? You’re terrifying the poor girl.” The woman in white extended a hand to Rey, who had stopped screaming out of curiosity. “Rey, is it? So sorry about all this. I’m Leia. I just want a chat.”

“What are you director of?” 

“Oh, that.” Leia waved it off. “I occupy a minor position in the Government, it’s not important. No, dear - I wanted to speak to you as Ben Solo’s mother.”

“Ben Solo?”

“Kylo Ren, ma’am.” This from Kaydel in an aside. “He goes by Kylo Ren these days.”

“Yes, I know, Kaydel, thank you.” To Rey: “There’s a Pret round the corner that I think is still open, do you fancy a bite?”

Rey was in fact starving. In the Pret A Manger, Leia watched her polish off a meatball wrap and a lemon ricotta pot. Kaydel sat at the next table, texting with a disaffected air.

“I worry about Ben,” Leia was saying. “He was always a volatile child. A genius, yes, but that _temper._ ”

Rey snorted in an unladylike fashion.

“And he hasn’t much patience for people who can’t keep up with him. Those who can, few as they are, he’s somehow managed to alienate.”

“I don’t see where I come into it,” said Rey around a mouthful of meatball. “He’s a bloody nightmare and if it weren’t for the rent, I’d walk.”

“Well, see, that’s what I don’t want you to do,” said Leia. “We’ve been watching you. Oh, don’t look at me like that, no more than the government watches anyone.”

“You followed me to Hallam Street. I didn’t even know where I was going.”

Leia shrugged. “You seem like a good girl, you know? Doing your best with what you’ve got. I wonder, though, if it would help you to have some funds to ease your way?”

“What?”

“I know you’ve got that scholarship, but there’s your other expenses to think of. How would you like not to have to work at that garage any more? You could focus on your degree.”

“What’s the catch?”

“Nothing much. Just keep an eye on Ben for me.”

“You want me to spy on your son,” said Rey, disbelieving. “Why can’t you do it yourself?”

“We’re not exactly on good terms, not right now,” said Leia vaguely. “I’d just need you to stay with him and report back to me on what he’s up to, what kinds of cases he’s getting himself tangled up in, if he’s using again - ”

“Using?” repeated Rey. “ _Using_?”

“He’s been through rehab, so that’s all behind him now, thankfully. I think.” Leia fixed her with a look that was so astoundingly like Kylo’s that Rey nearly choked on lemon curd. “So, you’ll do it?”

“Um,” said Rey. “Did you make Hux the same offer?”

“God, no,” said Leia with heat, “as if I’d cut a deal with that ginger rat. No, Rey - like I said, I pick the people I want to work with carefully.”

It felt wrong. Rey knew so, instinctively. But living rent-free in Zone 1? That was a powerful temptation.

“I would have to think about it,” she said carefully. “Thanks for the food.”

Leia sighed noisily and got up. “Should you make up your mind, let Kaydel know.”

“I’ve already sent you my contact,” said Kaydel, still tapping away industriously on her phone.

“That is very creepy and I hope you know that,” Rey told her.

“Of course,” said Kaydel, absently. “Bye.”

Having declined Leia’s offer of a lift home, Rey watched the Audi peel away from the curb. Her earlier weariness returned to her suddenly, tenfold. She wanted to go to sleep, in the bed she was coming round to thinking of as hers.

A light was still on at 221B when she got back. Kylo answered the door when she rang, looking strained. Rey pushed past him silently and clomped up the stairs.

“I made tea,” he said from the door, and this was so unlikely an occurrence that Rey actually froze in the living room.

“Okay,” she said, trying to keep her voice expressionless. Then, as he went to get the kettle, “You didn’t go to Bond Street.”

“You didn’t have your keys,” he said. “You’d have been locked out.”

“Right.” Rey settled for sinking into an armchair.

Kylo placed the tea cautiously at her elbow and planted himself in the other chair, brooding in her direction over clasped hands.

After the silence had stretched uncomfortably long, he said, stiffly, “I’m sorry that I brought up your parents.”

“Okay,” said Rey.

“I could find them, if you want that. I could try.”

“It’s fine. Maybe you were right. That I don’t want to know why they left me.”

“I don’t want you to leave,” he said abruptly. He paused, as if embarrassed by this rush of words. “I mean. I’m not easy to live with. But I can try. I’ve thrown the mould out, for starters.”

“It’s a bit far gone for that,” Rey observed.

Kylo scrubbed his hands through his hair in exasperation. “Look, I said I was sorry - ” He bit off his sentence. “Is it the rent? Is that why you keep that job at the garage, when it tires you so? Because I can, I don’t know, cover more of the rent - ”

“Does your family have tons of money?” Rey wanted to know. “It just feels like you’re all so keen to throw it at me.”

“Wait,” said Kylo. “What?”

Rey told him about Leia.

“I see,” said Kylo stonily. “Did you take up her offer?”

“I haven’t said yes.”

“Well, you should.” He got up and began to pace. “Make money off me. It’s time my family drama did someone else some good.”

“What happened?” Rey asked quietly.

He paused in the doorway - not mad, just considering. “If you tell me about your parents, I’ll tell you about mine. But not tonight.” He nodded at her tea. “Drink that, it’s getting cold.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's case borrows from not from a Sherlock Holmes story but a Brooklyn Nine-Nine episode.
> 
> I still haven't fixed my giant Reichenbach-sized plot problem and this was the last chapter before Actual Plot is unavoidable so...fingers crossed that works out soon?


	3. The Scarlet Thread of Murder

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it, Plot Commences, we're past the point of no return. Content warning: it gets a lot, _lot_ darker ahead - serial killings and references to suicide.

“Rey,” says Kylo urgently, “we don’t have much time.”

“What?” Rey does not understand. Kylo has shoved up the window and is climbing out of it onto the fire escape. “No, wait, what’re you doing - ”

“I need to go,” he says. “You’ll be fine, just stay put and tell them what they want to know, you’ll be fine - ”

“Where are you going?”

“Better you don’t know.” He reaches past her to grab the backpack under the window. “You won’t have to lie to the police. I know you hate lying.”

“But you didn’t murder those people,” she begins, and her voice catches in her throat. “Did - did you murder them?”

Kylo straightens up and looks her in the eye. “Did I murder them, Rey?”

Rey swallows. “I don’t think you did.”

He gives her a crooked smile, and for a second she glimpses the weariness in his eyes. “There’s that, at least.”

“Then why run?”

“No time,” says Kylo. He is tracking a hundred things at once: the foot traffic in the alleyway below, the distant screams of police sirens growing closer, the movements of her face. “There’s an envelope on the mantelpiece, Rey. What’s inside is for you. Open it when I’m gone.”

“We can solve it,” she says in a rush, “you can prove you didn’t do it, you always do, you always crack the case - ”

He puts a finger to her lips. She stills. He’s never touched her face before. He must feel it, the startled breath she draws against his skin.

The sirens, rounding the corner into Baker Street. 

Kylo pulls away, and he’s gone. 

*

**_24 hours earlier_ **

“If you’re such a bloody genius,” said Rey, “you should solve the mystery of why our sink is clogged.”

“Did you try baking soda and vinegar?” came Kylo’s voice from inside the bathroom, over the sound of the hairdryer.

“Think you used up all the baking soda last week in that experiment of yours.” Rey had a thought. “Hang on. Did you pour your experiment down the sink?”

The silence was telling. “ _Kylo_ ,” huffed Rey.

“Don’t pour anything else down there for the moment,” called Kylo. “Lest it form sentient thought and become a Marvel supervillain.”

“You would be a terrible superhero,” Rey informed him.

“But I would look superb in a cape.” Kylo emerged from the bathroom, and Rey temporarily forgot the sink problem because he was wearing just a towel. She kept her eyes firmly fixed on the sink, suddenly glad she wasn’t holding anything. The first time this had happened, she had dropped one of his beakers. Kylo, oddly, had not been mad. In fact he had been somewhat amused. Nor had it stopped him from continuing in this vein.

“Are you trying to distract me from the sink problem?” she said, striving for testiness in her voice.

“No,” said Kylo. “Is it working?”

Exceedingly, but he wasn’t to know that. “Go put something on,” Rey told him haughtily, trying to ignore the geometry of where his collarbones met his impossibly broad shoulders.

“It’s my flat too, I’ll have you know,” said Kylo. “You’re perfectly welcome to walk around topless anytime you want.” But he did disappear into his room. Rey could hear him rummaging around in the black hole he called a wardrobe. She figured she might as well get lunch started. Maybe pasta. The tinned tomatoes were expiring. She opened the fridge and shrieked. 

“For the fifth time,” Kylo called, “they’re only eyeballs.”

“ _Only eyeballs_ ,” repeated Rey through gritted teeth. The offending eyeballs stared back at her, floating in brine on the second shelf, next to the butter dish.

“Just turn them around.”

“Then we see their stalks,” complained Rey, “and that’s hardly an improvement.”

“You nag,” said Kylo. “So much.”

“You’re a monster,” Rey shot back. “I will never forgive you, and neither will the plumber when I call him on Monday.”

“I promise they’ll be out of the fridge by Friday.” Kylo had materialised behind her. He had put on a shirt, at least, but she could still smell the shower on his skin, the mysterious spice in his exorbitant hair product, which he spent far more on than she did her entire skincare routine. She could see the angles of his jawline and the faint red creases on his unnaturally pale skin from wearing safety goggles all morning. He was utterly maddening and yet somehow she was loath to disrupt the precarious, uncanny balance that was living with him, for reasons that didn’t entirely have to do with rental security any more. She spent more time with him than she did anyone else in her life and she still could not put into words what she was to him. There was something coagulating in her chest, clogging it, like the sink. 

“Thank you,” she said, trying to keep her voice even.

They were, she suddenly realised, very close. A consequence of their tiny kitchen being so very full of things. Rey swallowed and watched Kylo do the same, his Adam’s apple bobbing. 

“I - ” she began.

Kylo’s phone rang.

“Fuck,” said Kylo with feeling, and answered it with more vehemence than was warranted. “Yes, Poe, what is it?”

Rey, released from the intensity of his gaze, fiddled with the sink plug.

“Case?” she said, her tone light, when he hung up.

Kylo scrubbed one hand over his face and sighed noisily. “Yep.”

“Let’s go,” she said.

*

**_23 hours earlier_ **

The body was in an abandoned power station in Wapping. Rey loved power stations as a rule - their echoing halls, the minutiae of pumps and valves, the memory of electricity humming through them. It irked her that she clearly shared interests with a murderer.

Finn met them at the entrance. He looked unsettled, which was rare. Rey made a face at him. “Not pretty?”

“Well,” said Finn, “that’s kind of the problem, see.” And then they turned the corner into the main hall and Rey saw her: the young woman in flowing red, propped up in a chair like a queen on a throne.

Next to her, Kylo went still. 

“She’s been posed,” Finn was saying. “That’s the most disturbing thing about it.”

Poe was kneeling at the dead woman’s feet, staring up into her face - unnaturally pale, Rey realised, not from death but from pancake make-up. There were two bright spots of rouge on her cheeks, and a smear of red on her bottom lip, as if someone had dragged their thumb down it.

“No visible cause of death,” he said over his shoulder. “Not that we can tell from here.”

“You won’t find it,” said Kylo. 

Everyone turned to stare at him.

“She’ll have died of asphyxiation.” Kylo twisted the fingertip of a glove, but did not pull it off. “But you won’t find any marks on her throat, nor anything in her bloodwork.”

A muscle was working in his cheek. “You’ve seen this before,” said Rey.

“No,” said Kylo slowly. “I haven’t. Not in my lifetime.”

And then: “I can’t be here.”

“What?” Poe stood up. “But you just got here.”

“Keep an eye on things,” Kylo told Rey in a low voice, “but I need to go.” In a flare of coat, he turned and strode out of the power station.

Poe and Finn gaped after him. Then at Rey, who shrugged nonchalantly and said: “Could I hitch a ride back later?”

She rode with Finn after forensics took the body away. “What’s he on about?” Finn wanted to know.

“He’ll explain it in time, when he sorts it out.” Kylo was endlessly mysterious, often frustratingly opaque; Rey had got accustomed to it.

“He recognised it.”

“He said he’d never seen it.”

“But he knows what it is. It was all over his face.” Finn slanted a look at her. “He’s not the only one who notices things around here.”

Rey fiddled with the air vent. “You should be careful, Rey,” added Finn.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He’s too clever by half, that Ren,” said Finn. “I know Poe trusts him, and you trust him, of course, enough to put up with him at home. I’m glad he’s on our side. But every time he helps us catch another one, I can’t help but think - what happens if he stops being on our side? Who’d catch _him_?”

Rey thought of Kylo crowding her against the sink, gaze darkening. “You can drop me off at Westminster if you like,” she said. “I’ll take the Tube back.”

Finn sighed. “Don’t take it the wrong way, Rey.”

Rey forced a smile, patted his hand. “It’s fine. It’s a nice day for a walk. I don’t want to take you out of your way.”

She could use a coffee, she thought, clattering into Westminster Station, blinking away sudden fatigue. Slipping into line at Costa, she accidentally elbowed one of the City suits. “Watch it!” he snapped, and then did a double-take. “Hang on. You’re that girl who replaced me.”

Red hair. Face like a rat. “Hux,” said Rey, drawing the name out of the depths of memory with reluctance.

Hux snorted. “So how long did it take for you to leave that madhouse?”

“Um,” said Rey. “I’m still living there, actually.”

“With that psychopath?” Hux scoffed. “God, you’re a soft touch.”

“Oi,” Rey snapped. “Watch it, Gingerbread Latte. How'd you even move in together, if you hate each other so much?”

"He did me a favour once," said Hux vaguely. "But he's lorded that over me since; I'd had enough. I always thought it’d only be a matter of time before he snapped and murdered someone. Any moment now.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“You know what’s ridiculous? Keeping the skull of your serial killer grandfather on the mantelpiece, that’s ridiculous.”

“Wait,” said Rey. “What?”

Hux raised his eyebrows. “You honestly didn’t know? His grandfather was the Vader killer.” And then, as Rey continued to gape at him, “One of London’s biggest serial killers? Murdered some 20 people, to this day they still haven’t figured out how. God, what do they teach in schools these days?”

“Not about serial killers, they don’t.” Rey’s mind raced. “What do you mean, they still haven’t figured out how?”

“No marks on them,” said Hux. “No toxins, nothing.” He seemed ghoulishly interested in the notion. “Drove his own wife to suicide when she found out. She hadn’t the slightest clue, poor woman. And his grandson keeps his bleached skull above the fireplace. What a family. Double espresso,” he added to the barista; Rey hadn’t even realised they’d reached the front of the queue. “What’re you having?”

“Flat white,” said Rey, dazed.

“I’ll get hers as well,” Hux told the barista. “I’ve enjoyed dropping this particular truth bomb. Rethinking your living situation?”

“Fuck off.”

“Cheers.” Hux collected his coffee and raised it mockingly. “Let’s never do this again, shall we?”

*

**_19 hours earlier_ **

Rey lowered herself until she was at eye-level with the skull. Its empty sockets stared back at her. Rey studied its yellowed surfaces, the stains on its teeth. It had been a human once. It had been a murderer. She tried to fish around for a sense of horror but came up dry.

The door banged open and Rey turned as Kylo burst in, carrying a cardboard box. He stopped short when he saw her. 

“Your grandfather,” began Rey.

Kylo set down the box. “Who told you?”

“Hux. I ran into him at Costa.”

“That little shit.” Kylo sat down heavily. "He's in a league of his own. I saved him from making a fool of himself one time and he's never got over it."

Rey perched on the opposite armchair cautiously, pointing a thumb at the skull. “That’s Leia’s father?”

Kylo nodded. “She doesn’t like it to be known. Doesn’t look good, in her position. But I found out when I was in university. Hux knows; we were in the same college.”

“Anakin Skywalker,” he added. “That was his real name.”

“And you think that there’s a copycat killer.”

“Not just that.” Kylo hefted the box into his lap. It was filled with books - faded paperbacks, the sort you would find in the bargain bin at Oxfam’s. He picked one out and laid it on the coffee table for her inspection.

Rey’s breath caught. On the cover was a young woman in red, seated on a throne. _A Study In Scarlet_ , read the title, and under that, _Padme A. Naberrie_.

“Took me a while to find these,” said Kylo. “They’re all out of print. She was a cracking mystery writer, Padme Naberrie. Could have been one of the greats, but her reputation never survived her husband’s.”

Rey touched the cover of the novel. “She was your grandmother.”

“Never got over what he did,” went on Kylo. He had started pacing. “Blamed herself for it - for his fascination with death, though really none of his murders resembled anything she wrote, that would have been too easy. My mother has no memory of her. They said she died of a broken heart long before he was caught - which I’ve always thought sounded frightfully baroque, but it does appear to be an actual medical condition.” He upended the rest of the books onto the table.

Rey picked up another. The cover resembled a Millais painting, the woman lying in state, lapped in blue velvet, studded with tiny white flowers. Could be asleep, could be dead. _The Sign Of The Force,_ the title read.

“She did the paintings herself,” Kylo pointed out. “Quite the polymath, really.”

Rey held up _A Study In Scarlet_ and _The Sign Of The Force._ “So why would somebody kill someone like your grandfather and style the body like your grandmother?”

Kylo flopped on the couch. “To lay a trail.”

“Where?” said Rey, even though she already knew the answer and didn’t want to give it voice.

Kylo stared at the ceiling. “To me.”

*

**_Five hours earlier_ **

“Rey,” said Kylo urgently. “Rey.”

“Ugh.” Rey dragged herself out of a nest of bedclothes. Kylo was looming over her, hand outstretched to shake her into waking. “What time is it?”

“Seven,” said Kylo remorselessly. “There’s been a new one. I need you to go. I’m calling you a cab, it’ll be here in ten.”

“Must I really?” whined Rey, as Kylo began coaxing her out of the bedclothes. She flopped against him. In the cold of dawn, his skin ran hot like a furnace. She felt herself nodding off.

“Rey,” said Kylo, “I don’t wish to, but I will shake you if I must. Get dressed.”

“All right, all right.” Rey flapped blearily at him. “Go outside.”

“Don’t fall asleep,” warned Kylo, closing the door.

Ten minutes later, he was bundling her into a cab and giving the address to the driver - somewhere in North Finchley. 

“I don’t see why you can’t go,” said Rey mulishly. 

“It’s best if I don’t put in an appearance. Be my eyes.” Kylo shut the door on her and banged on the roof of the cab, which peeled off into morning rush hour.

The address turned out to be a carpark outside a Vue cinema. “Where’s himself?” asked Finn when he met her at the drop-off. 

“Didn’t come along.” Rey yawned. “Don’t ask me why, it’s too early. Where’s the body?”

It was another young woman, dressed in white this time. She was upright against a lamppost, to which she had been lashed with chains, her hands dragged up and pinioned above her head. Rey swallowed, her gorge rising. She had seen this cover last night. _The Hounds Of Petranaki._

“It’s the same as Wapping,” said Finn. “No marks, no clear cause of death. What is it with these tableaux?”

“Beats me,” said Rey faintly.

“A serial killer,” went on Finn. “We’ll have to announce it at some point. Just the thought of it is driving Poe mental.”

“No CCTV?” Poe was saying to a tech. “At all? Oh, for crying out loud.”

“Did you get a match on the first victim yet?” Rey asked Finn.

“Not yet, but we do have a sketch of her without all that make-up on.” Finn showed her on his phone, then nodded at the body slumped against the lamppost. “Has a type, our killer. Likes brunettes.”

He paused, then held the sketch up, comparing. “Look familiar?”

Rey was thinking of the author photo of Padme Naberrie that Kylo had shown her last night. She’d been impeccably made up, with her hair done up in fifties-style pincurls, a world away from the grotesquerie of these scenes. Still: white, slender, brunette.

“You,” said Finn. There was foreboding in his voice. “They looked like you.”

*

**_Half an hour earlier_ **

Rey’s hands were still shaking around the mug of tea she was clasping.

“I suppose I do look a bit like her,” she heard herself say.

“And isn’t that unsettling.” Kylo was pacing again. “They’ll have been picked for the resemblance, of course. The question is how the killer knows Anakin’s method. No one’s worked it out. Not Luke, not me, and god knows I’ve tried.”

“Luke?” 

Kylo didn’t seem to have heard. He had now picked up the skull and was holding it contemplatively. “Alas, poor Skywalker. Would that I knew his ways.” 

Rey’s phone rang. It was Finn. “Listen, are you back at the flat yet?”

“Wh - ”

“Don’t go back in,” Finn said in a rush. “We’re on our way.”

“What do you mean?” Kylo watched her, gripping the skull of his grandfather, knuckles white.

“Rey,” she heard him say, “have you heard of the Vader killer?”

Rey hung up.

“They’re coming for you,” she said.

*

**_Now_ **

The police find Rey sitting in the armchair facing the window. Maz’s shouts follow them upstairs. The knock comes, thunderous. “It isn’t locked,” she calls, and is proud of how her voice doesn’t tremble.

She shuts her eyes as they charge in, hears the yells of “Clear! Clear!” as they search the rooms. When she opens them, Poe is crouched in front of her, his face surprisingly gentle. “He’s gone, isn’t he?”

Rey nods mutely.

Poe sighs. “I’m sorry, Rey. We’ll have to take you in for questioning. I hope you understand.”

Rey shrugs.

“Did he leave anything?”

Rey nods towards the envelope, still unopened on the mantelpiece. 

As they move to bag it, she says: “Could I read it, at least? It was meant for me.”

“Rey - ” begins Poe, but Finn, after feeling the envelope, hands it wordlessly to her.

Rey opens it. She does not, at first, understand what is inside.

There are two death certificates. A man, and a woman. Police reports, a cold case. And then she is looking at a birth certificate, an unknown name, a date of birth a few months shy of the one she was assigned. A photo of a child, sandy-haired and squinting at the camera.

Rey looks down into the eyes of her young self and claps a hand over her mouth.

She feels everyone in the room gazing at her in pity.

“He found me,” she says, and here come the tears. “He found me.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was not able to resist slipping in a "league of his own" joke about Hux - I originally considered giving him his own Red-Headed League storyline, but it proved too much of a detour.
> 
> Shoutout to @yesterdaychild for flagging Chekhov's Skull!


	4. The Adventure of the Sussex Beekeeper

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains a reference to limb loss (no more than happens in the films).

Rey parks at the foot of the slope and emerges into the honeysuckle-sweet air of the countryside. She can’t remember the last time she got so far away from the city. There’s a humming in the air; she tracks it to the yellow swarm hovering under the trees at the top of the slope. Rey bends down to tie her shoelaces, and then she begins to trudge up to the low white house atop the incline.

There’s a low gate, which is unlatched. As she hesitates, a figure in a wide-brimmed white hat and veil comes round the corner of the house and stops to glare at her. “If you want to buy honey,” he says gruffly, “try further down the road.”

“I’m not looking for honey,” Rey calls. “I’m looking for the greatest consulting detective in the world.”

The man pulls the veil over his head and regards her with suspicion. He is grizzled; there is something haggard about the lines in his face. He pulls a hip flask out from beneath his beekeeping garb and takes a swig, his eyes never leaving hers. Rey doubts that’s water in his flask.

“Try further down the road,” he repeats, and makes to turn away.

“Luke Skywalker,” says Rey. 

He stops. She watches the rise and fall of his shoulders.

“I need your help,” she says. “It’s about Ben Solo.”

Luke doesn’t turn back, but he gestures at the gate.

“Let yourself in, will you? And mind the bees.”

*

The days after Kylo’s disappearance passed in a daze. Rey spent many hours in an euphemistically-named “meeting room”, saying over and over again, “I had no reason to believe Kylo Ren was involved in these murders.”

They had taken in all the Naberrie novels, which were now spread like an awful collage over the table. “You must admit, Rey,” said Poe, “everything points to him.”

“Precisely,” said Rey. “It’s too perfect. If he’d killed these women, there wouldn’t be a single clue tying him to them.”

“There’s that ego of his to contend with. Maybe he wanted everyone to know how clever he was.”

Rey steepled her fingers, much like she’d seen Kylo do. “Not very clever, is it, if it took you less than 24 hours to figure out?”

At least Finn remembered her coffee order. He drove her back to Baker Street as she sipped on a takeaway flat white. “You have to let us know if you hear from him,” he said.

“I won’t,” said Rey. “Hear from him, that is. You think I’m a liability, don’t you?”

Finn braked at a red light with a little more vehemence than was called for. “Well, you warned him off, didn’t you?”

“Do you think he did it?”

Finn was silent for a long time, his fingers drumming on the wheel. Then he said: “No. He’s a tool and I’ve wanted to break his nose half the crime scenes we’ve been at, but no. Neither does Poe, but it’s hard to gainsay the evidence. Anyway, it’s gone above our heads. Some people have had it out for him for a long time.”

Baker Street was full of reporters, who jumped to their feet as the car pulled in. Finn swore and leapt out. He elbowed their way through the press, yelling, “Watch it! Back off!” at the reporters, who responded with questions - “Did you know what Kylo Ren was up to?” “Are you his girlfriend?” - until she was handed off at the door to Maz, who was beating some of the more intrepid reporters off with a broom.

“Well, this is a bloody nightmare,” said Maz, once they were safely ensconced in her kitchen. “There go my bridge night plans. How are you going to get to class, then?”

“It’s Reading Week.” For which Rey was unspeakably thankful.

It was strange being in the empty flat. The police had taken many things from it, such as the skull and even the eyeballs from the fridge. Rey curled up on the couch under the bullet holes and stared at the ceiling, which Kylo had seemed to find oddly helpful in his thought processes.

Her parents were dead. She had been allowed to keep the documents from the envelope after all - intervention from Poe - and she had read them over and over. Once she had been born under another name and stolen from a parking lot - no grand nefarious scheme, just some junkies who had hotwired a car that was not theirs and failed to check the back seat for a child. That she had not been returned, that she had been needlessly kept and then abandoned later and never picked up, that her parents in the meantime had died of the most mundane cause - a car accident - without knowing their child still lived, in the same country even - the waste of it. The waste. Rey tasted blood on her tongue; she had bitten her lip. She curled up on herself.

The doorbell woke her. She had slipped into sleep without knowing. Hadn’t Maz said that she’d disconnected the doorbell, because of the reporters? Rey fumbled for the intercom.

A voice said crisply: “Delivery for a Miss Irena Watson.”

“I didn’t order anything,” said Rey thickly.

“I think you’ll find you did. From the Pret in Euston.”

Rey buzzed them up.

Kaydel entered in a pale mint suit, looking less like she worked at Pret and more like she owned a respectable chunk of shares in it. She nodded briskly at Rey and began setting up a laptop on the kitchen table, something only made possible because the police had taken most of Kylo’s experiments.

“Um,” said Rey, bewildered. “Can I offer you something to drink?”

Kaydel said, “Testing, testing, yes ma’am, she’s ready for you,” and then she gestured for Rey to come over.

“Rey, my dear,” said Leia onscreen. “How are you?”

Rey made a choked noise that could, in another life, have been a laugh. “Do you really want to know? Because we might be here awhile if you do.”

“The short version, if you please,” said Kaydel. “The director does not have much time.”

“Kaydel,” said Leia, “go sit down somewhere.”

Kaydel removed herself to a corner of the flat, where she stood around judging the furniture.

“You’ve not heard from him, have you?” said Rey.

“That isn’t a question either of us should answer,” said Leia, “not even on a private line.”

“Right. What do you want, then?”

Leia sighed. “My hands are tied. I’ve many enemies in high places, and Ben’s made his fair share of them too. Should I get involved in this investigation, none of them would hesitate to use it against me. In fact, I suspect they are counting on it. I need a free agent.”

“You want me to solve this?” Rey spluttered. “I’m not - I’m not Kylo.”

“To be sure,” said Leia. “Nevertheless, I rather think you’ll do all right. Kaydel will assist you with whatever logistics you may require.”

“I don’t know where to start,” said Rey. “I can’t even go to Tesco now for tripping over the press.”

“That, at least, we can help with. They’ll be gone by this evening.”

“Did you know him? Your father?”

Leia was still for so long that Rey thought the screen had frozen. 

“No,” she said finally. “I was adopted after my mother died. I didn’t learn of it myself until I was about your age. You can imagine what a blow that must have been, for a young woman with ambitions in the government.”

“Kylo said nobody ever worked out how the Vader killer committed his murders,” mused Rey. “But this copycat must know. Who would have that kind of information?”

“Ben certainly tried. He was always rather obsessed with his grandfather. Han thought it was just that morbid streak that children have, but I always worried - ” She bit off her sentence. Rey waited for her to compose herself. 

“There is somebody else who might know,” said Leia eventually. “He’s hard to reach, in more ways than one. You’ll have to go in person. Can you drive?”

*

“This honey is very good,” says Rey politely, drizzling it into a cup of tea.

“It had damn well better be,” says Luke, “the effort I put in. What makes you think Ben didn’t do it?”

“I know he didn’t,” says Rey. “It’s not like him.”

“Know a lot, do you?” Luke tips the contents of his flask into his own tea with his left hand. His right, Rey notices, hangs woodenly by his side. “I know my nephew, Rey. There’s a darkness in him. Leia’s spin team has put a lot into covering it all up, from his misspent youth to the drug habit, but he’s still more like our father than she’ll ever admit.”

“Your father wasn’t caught for years,” said Rey. “Not until you joined the force. If there’s someone who can solve this, it’s you.”

“No,” says Luke. He rises. “I’m done with that. I’m done with Ben and his messes. Send Leia my regards.”

“You’re running away,” says Rey. “That’s what you’re doing here, keeping bees in the South Downs, isn’t it? You’re afraid of dealing with the shadow of your father.”

Luke abruptly rolls up his sleeve, unhooks his right hand and slams it on the table between them.

It’s a prosthetic. It was hard to tell when he was wearing it, because of the woollen glove pulled over it, but Rey can now see the exposed joints and the stump of Luke’s wrist.

“He cut that off,” says Luke. “My father. He’d lost his hand too, during the war. Said it’d help me see things from his point of view. He made me watch. So don’t you come in here, Miss Watson, and tell me what I do and don’t know about the darkness in my family.”

Rey stares at the hand. “I’m sorry,” she ventures.

After a while, Luke says: “It was a poison. Inside it would look like they had been strangled, but outside they looked untouched. It had to have been orally administered, because you would never find any marks on the bodies. That’s how I knew he didn’t mean to kill me.” He raised the stump of his wrist.

“I could never recreate the poison." His mouth twists wryly. "It’s a tad hard, without human subjects.” 

“Could he have passed on the formula before you got to him?”

“Possibly.” Luke sat down again. “There was a group that worshipped him, called themselves the Order. Nutters, the lot - got hold of some of his things, hoarded them as if they were memorabilia. They tried to get in touch with Ben when he was younger. It was them who gave him the skull. But as far as I know, they’ve been defunct for years.”

“Have you got any files on them?” 

“I may have some, in the attic. I’ll give them to you if you go away and leave me alone.” Luke gets up heavily. “For the record, I keep bees on the South Downs because I like bees. They’re efficient, they’re orderly, and they never ask questions.”

  
  



	5. The Finaliser Problem

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNING: please note the updated tags, there will be a scene in this chapter that seems to be a suicide - this is no spoiler if you are familiar with Sherlock and the Reichenbach Fall, but if you may be triggered by this, stop reading after **“It’s me you want, isn’t it?” he says heavily.**

Rey looks at the gravestone. Holds up her print-out and compares. Toes the grass and dirt with the tip of her boots. Sits on the backs of her heels to inspect the epitaph: 

_ HAN SOLO _

_ 1950 - 2008 _

_ Loving husband and father _

Rey takes out a tape measure from her pocket. She is measuring the length of the grave when she says out loud: “I know you’re there. You can come out.”

Poe steps out from behind a mausoleum with only a modicum of sheepishness. “Anybody would be suspicious that you’re planning a spot of grave robbery,” he says. “Not that old Han would object, mind. He’d probably give you tips.”

Rey measures the headstone. “Did you know him?”

“I’ve known the Solos since Ben and I were kids,” says Poe. “It doesn’t endear me to him; sometimes I think we’d have fought less, if we’d met as adults. Did he ever tell you about what happened with his father?”

_ “There was an accident,” said Kylo. “He fell. It was my fault.” _

_ “Was this before the drugs, or after?” _

_ “During.” He grimaced; he did not want to talk about this, but they had agreed to trade. “I was in a bad situation then. He was coming to get me. My mother hushed it all up later. There were a lot of people out for his blood as it was, because of the work he did. He was something of a common criminal. We were both rather inconvenient for her career.” _

_ “You don’t mean that,” she ventured. _

_ “Ah.” He laughed; it sounded hollow. “But don’t I?” _

“We've talked about it,” says Rey. 

"Makes you wonder, doesn't it? The way death follows him around." Poe makes a face. "I suppose we should have clocked it earlier, but he was just too good at what he did for us."

Rey gets to her feet and gestures at the grave. “This is it. Where they’ll put the next body.”

Poe stares. “On his father’s grave?”

Rey hands him the print-out of the cover of The Sign Of The Force. “Fits, don’t you think?”

Poe studies the print-out. “The other two locations were random. Why not this one?”

“He’s on the run now. They’ve got to up the ante - it has to be more personal.”

“You keep saying ‘they’,” points out Poe. “When surely you mean ‘he’.”

“I mean what I say, Inspector.”

Poe sighs. “Be careful, Rey. You’re on thin ice as it is.”

“I’m aware.” Rey sticks out her hand. “I’d like my print-out back, if you please.”

When she’s done in the cemetery, she takes a walk around the neighbourhood. If the murders happen off-site, the Order must have somewhere nearby to dress the bodies before they are transported. Rey wanders along Highgate Hill towards Archway, studying the buildings. 

She doesn’t know very much about the first two victims; the Yard won’t share it with her, and even Finn has grown cagey, no doubt warned off her. She has no names, no identities to go off. She wonders if they were picked off the streets for their resemblance to Padme. No homes, no one to miss them. Like she would have been, if she hadn't got lucky.

She’s been walking around for about an hour now, it feels like - aimlessly, not headed anywhere in particular, just looking and listening. She hears the sound of drilling, and as ever her ear is drawn to it. There’s a construction site at the hospital she’s passing - looks like a whole wing. Rey turns to look at the hospital. You could smuggle a body out of a hospital, could you not? 

“Think,” she whispers to herself. “What would Kylo do?”

Rey checks her phone, sees that she has missed a call from Rose. She ducks into the shelter of a service entrance to call her back. There are hospital workers in scrubs standing around on their smoke breaks. “You sure you’re doing okay?” Rose wants to know when she picks up.

“I’m fine, really,” sighs Rey. “Tell Paige to stop fretting, I can hear you both clear across London.”

“If you need me to cover for you at project meeting on Monday, just say the word,” says Rose. “I bet Jay’s not going to show up with his section of the proposal finished, and he hasn’t even got the excuse of having to run about exonerating his flatmate for serial-killing.” 

“Ugh, Jay. Don't worry, I'll be there.” Rey idly watches the man next to her take a drag on his cigarette. He’s not in scrubs. Maybe one of the builders? His phone is positioned in an odd way, she notes. And then she realises: he’s filming her.

Rey doesn’t react. She continues chattering to Rose - “Look, we should catch up sometime since it’s Reading Week, maybe check out that new cafe you spotted on Caledonian Road?” - and lets her eyes drift to the glass wall behind the man. The reflection is faint, but enough to confirm her suspicions.

It could be nothing. Just another pervert in passing - god knows it’s happened to her enough times on the Tube. “What are you talking about?” Rose says. “I haven’t been to Caledonian Road in forever.”

“It’s got Victoria sponge,” Rey prattles on, “you’re always saying how hard it is to find a good Victoria sponge in London.” Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the man put his phone away and head back into the hospital. Rey follows him, trying to make it look like she’s just wandering. She feigns interest in a vending machine as he waits for the lift. Too obvious to get in after him; instead, she watches in the reflection of the glass display as the floor numbers tick up. Level 13. 

“Where are you?” Rose is asking. “Is something wrong? Rey, do you need us to come get you?”

“It’s probably nothing. I’ll call you back.” She hangs up, drops a pin at her location in Google Maps and forwards it to Finn.

She takes the next lift.

The 13th floor is a long corridor of doors to what Rey guesses are offices, mostly locked. At the end of it is a sheet of plastic tacked up as a rough curtain. The floor beyond it is covered in a plastic tarp. She hears, again, a lone drill in the distance.

Rey ducks, as quietly as she can, past the plastic sheet.

This wing of the hospital seems to be under construction. Everything is covered in plastic, and the wiring is hanging exposed from the ceiling. It’s chilly up here; she can feel the wind. The lights are off, but there are holes in some of the tarpaulins they’ve put up to keep the wind out, scattering daylight across the plastic-sheeted floor like marbles.

Her phone buzzes. Finn has sent her, in response: “?”

She senses movement, looks up, opens her mouth to scream. Something clamps down hard around it and she breathes in the sickening smell of chloroform. Her knees buckle. “Careful,” somebody is saying - a man’s voice, he sounds old - “careful. No marks.” As her vision swims, she sees him approach. “We want her just as she should be.”

*

When she wakes up, she can’t move. 

“It’s too soon,” she hears. “The paralytics will show up in her bloodwork.”

“Well, you were careless, weren’t you?” That voice, silken and thick with menace - the last thing she had heard before she passed out. “You let her follow you. Now we’ve had to move up the timeline.”

“She wasn’t supposed to be here.”

“She’s a clever girl.” The voice, closer. “Too clever for her own good. Or yours.”

There’s an overpowering scent. Some kind of flower. Rey’s eyes dart around. She’s in a box, laid flat out in blue velvet with her hands resting on her sternum. Like a corpse in a coffin. The Sign Of The Force.

Rey tries to clench her fingers. She feels her pinky crook, just slightly.

The man leans over her, hairless, teeth bared in a grin. The mottling of his skin is unsettling. He could be a hundred years old. He looks her up and down approvingly. “Rey,” he says. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance. You’ve caught us at a bad time, but we’re happy to have you anyway.”

Rey can only glare at him. The man nods indulgently, as if she’s said something witty in response. 

“Sir,” she hears someone else say urgently from across the room, “he’s here in the hospital. Headed up this way.”

A spasm of something like anger crosses the man’s face. He makes a swift, irritated hand motion and shifts out of her sight. Rey hears the men around the room move into position - there must be five, six of them. In the distance, the lift goes _ding_.

She knows his tread even before he enters, recognises it from many a sleepless night listening to him furiously pace the living room. 

“Kylo, my boy,” says her captor expansively. “Is this any way to greet an old friend?”

“Snoke,” says Kylo. She hears the sounds of guns cocking across the room. “You’ll forgive me for taking precautions. Where’s Rey?”

Rey makes a noise in her throat. It’s a sad, wretched animal noise, but it’s something.

“Rey?” There are a lot of things Kylo can do, she knows, but he is terrible at lying. There is a naked anguish in his voice that she wishes he could mask. 

“It’s too late,” says Snoke. “The poison’s in her system. It’s only a matter of time - unless you cooperate.”

“What do you want?” says Kylo.

“Surely you should have worked that out by now, genius boy. You’re wasted on the side of the angels; you could achieve so much if you came over to ours. The Order needs its leader.”

“And you thought you’d, what, frame me for a couple of murders and kidnap my flatmate? That’s your idea of persuasion?”

“They’ll pin them on you anyway. They’ve got you in their sights for this; your mother’s enemies will make sure of that. Normal people can be so dense, can’t they?” Snoke has drifted closer; he leans over her, fingers a strand of her hair. Rey feels her body fighting to shudder. “Though sometimes you get one that surprises you. I can see why you got attached.”

“Cut to the chase, Snoke.”

“Take over as the head of the Order,” says Snoke. “Declare it publicly, restore us to the old ways. Then we’ll give her the antidote.”

“How can I be sure you’ll keep your word?”

“You can’t.” Snoke chuckles. “But surely it’s in our interest to keep her alive. Just to be certain of your cooperation, at least until we can be assured of  _ your _ word.”

“I need to talk to her.”

“If you like.” Snoke moves away from the box. “But remember. The clock is ticking.”

Kylo comes into view. He has a gun in hand, which he puts down to reach into the box and pull her up. “Can you move, Rey?”

“Fingers,” she grits out. There’s a horrible prickling feeling all throughout her limbs now. “Pins and needles.”

“It’ll come back to you,” says Kylo. He has his arm around her, propping her upright. She can see around the room now; she counts six men plus Snoke. All but Snoke have guns trained on Kylo; they’re between him and the exit. 

“Antidote,” she whispers. “None.”

Kylo leans forward in the guise of checking her pulse. She says into his ear: “Luke’s papers. Say no antidote. They’re bluffing.”

“I know,” says Kylo into her hair.

“Don’t. Don’t join them. Not for me.”

“Rey,” says Kylo. “Listen. I’m used to being able to calculate everything. Not you. First you were a variable, then you were the equation, then you were the solution, then I ran out of math. I’m certain of everything in the world, except the space where you are. It’s terrifying. You can’t know.”

“What?” says Rey.

“I’m sorry,” he says. She feels him press something into her hand. Some sort of capsule. She doesn’t dare look at it.

Then he steps away from her, picking up the gun in a fluid motion.

“It’s me you want, isn’t it?” he says heavily. “You won’t stop. You’ve never stopped, all my life. You’ll just keep coming and coming.”

“You have it within you,” Snoke tells him, almost crooning. “Your family’s darkness. I saw it all those years ago, whatever your parents did to try and hide it. Don’t try to fight it this time.”

Kylo swallows. Then he says: “Maybe you have a point.”

“No - ” whispers Rey.

Kylo points the gun at her and fires. 

Rey is so shocked she cannot even scream; only her fingers spasm violently. 

Kylo spreads his arms. Then he lets himself fall backwards through the tarp, off the edge of the building.

Snoke is cursing. “No, no, no,  _ no _ !” He has stormed over to the edge and is staring down, spittle flying. There are sirens in the distance. One of his men grabs his sleeve, saying urgently, “Sir, we need to go,” and Snoke spins and pistol-whips him. The men gape at him. Snoke fumes. “Clear out,” he spits. 

“What about the girl?”

“Leave the body. It’s useless to us now.” He glances back at the torn tarp, rippling in the wind. “What a fucking waste.”

Rey feels no pain. Perhaps it is the shock; perhaps it is the paralytics. As the men clear out of the site, she looks down to see blood spreading across the heavy material of the dress. Her fingers twitch again and release a broken plastic capsule, dark and sticky. She touches her midriff. There is no wound.

She feels around further until her fingers skim over a bullet, lodged in the space between her elbow and her waist.

_ Not likely. I have excellent aim.  _

After what seems like an eternity, she finally manages to crawl out of the box. She drags herself across the floor to the edge and pushes aside the tarp to look.

There’s a body crumpled on the pavement, a black hole in the universe. Blood is seeping into the cobblestones, so much blood. People are gathered around him, tiny, screaming, distant.  Two paramedics are lifting him onto a stretcher. The tall, bearded one says something to the other, a grizzled man with grey hair, who looks up. For a second, Rey thinks he sees her, that something passes between them - pity? commiseration? - but then he looks back down, the moment’s gone, somebody is being wheeled away into the back of an ambulance, somebody Rey thought she once knew and even perhaps loved, but now there isn’t anything there, there isn’t anything there at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't plan to hold this out as any sort of cliffhanger because the Reichenbach Fall is one of the most spoiled twists in fandom, up there with Luke Skywalker's parentage. Still, it's a trope I intensely dislike, I spent a long time trying to work out an alternative to it and wasn't able to in the end, for which I apologise.


	6. The Adventure of the Empty House

The poison, it turns out, was never in Rey at all. It’s in a tiny vial, sitting on Poe Dameron’s desk in a Ziploc bag. Rey stares at it, marvelling at all the ruin wrought by these clear drops of liquid.

“It showed up at the front desk about half an hour after you were captured,” says Poe. He seems perplexed still, even though it has been days since the hospital. The bags under his eyes are enormous. “It was a package addressed to me. We didn’t even realise we had it for hours, because it was going through parcel checks and everything.”

“Did you see who dropped it off?”

“Receptionist doesn’t remember. It’s not clear on the CCTV either. Just some white guy in a delivery uniform. Not him, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“I wasn’t,” says Rey.

“How’d he even get it?”

“The Order had some of the leftover poison Anakin Skywalker made,” says Rey, slowly. “But not very much of it, and they didn’t know how to make more. They were clever, but they weren’t geniuses - that’s why they needed Kylo. They had to be very careful with the poison that they did have. I’d hazard that they had just about three doses to begin with, and only one left by the time I stumbled upon their set-up in the hospital. They didn’t keep it on-site - it was elsewhere, secured. If something upset their timeline - say, their target wandering into their base of operations ahead of schedule - they’d have to rush out to get it.” 

“And he followed them?”

“Not him,” says Rey. “The timelines don’t add up. But someone did. Someone grabbed that vial and dropped it off here for you.”

They contemplate the vial between them.

“What are you going to do with it?” Rey wants to know. “After they’re done with it for Snoke’s trial, that is.”

“I don’t know,” says Poe. “As evidence it should be kept in lock-up, but I’d really much rather destroy it.”

“I think you should take it to Luke Skywalker,” says Rey. “He’ll know what to do.”

She gets up to leave. “Rey,” says Poe, “I know I’ve said it many times, but we’re all really sorry about what happened. He wasn’t all that popular at the Yard while he was alive, but there isn’t a person here who doesn’t wish they’d listened to you about him.”

“I’m sure he would be thrilled to say ‘I told you so’.”

Poe looks cautiously up at her. “Rey, are you doing okay?”

“Of course,” says Rey. “I’m fine.”

“I mean, I know that you...cared about him.”

“I did.”

“Only you’re so…”

“Emotionless?” suggests Rey. “Frigid? Dead inside?”

Poe winces. “Your words, not mine.”

“I’m dealing with things my own way,” says Rey. “Thank you for your time, Inspector. I’ll have the sergeant see me out.”

Finn walks her to the door. “You’re sure you’ll be all right testifying at the trials?”

“I’m a key witness,” says Rey. “Why is everyone at the precinct treating me with kid gloves?”

Finn huffs quietly. “Guilt, probably. We all feel bad about the way we treated him.”

“He was a complete and utter arse and you know it,” says Rey. 

Tears are running down her face. Finn stops, alarmed.

“I’m just saying, there’s really no need to treat me any different,” she continues through her sobs.

Finn snags a tissue from a nearby sergeant’s desk and hands it to her silently. Everyone else cautiously goes about their business, pointedly ignoring the breakdown she’s having in the middle of the station.

“Would it be very inappropriate if I gave you a hug?” asks Finn.

“Probably,” sniffs Rey, “but you know I don’t care about all that.”

*

“What do you mean, there’s no funeral?” says Rose in disbelief.

“Dunno,” says Rey dully, knees tucked under her chin in a corner of the couch. There is too much room on the couch. There is too much room in the flat. Rey hasn’t even begun to wrap her mind around the enormity of sorting out Kylo’s things, let alone moving out. She’d tried to broach the issue of her not being able to stump up rent on her own, only for Maz to brush her off with a brusque kindness that was almost too much to bear. “It’s taken care of,” she said. She said that more than once, the first time after Rey showed up back at the flat dressed in an ugly sack dress that Jess Pava found at the last minute in Primark, because both her original clothes and the velvet dress that the cult had stuffed her into had been taken in as evidence.

“Did you ask his mum?”

“I don’t actually know how to get in touch with her,” says Rey. “I called her snotty assistant, who said it was going to be a family-only affair.”

“Huh,” says Rose. “That’s not a whole lot of people, is that?”

“No.”

“You’d think she’d let you attend, after all you’ve been through.”

“She did ask me to watch her son for her,” says Rey, “and I haven’t exactly covered myself in glory there, so.”

Rose goes over and puts her arms around her. Rey leans into her friend’s neck. “You nearly died yourself,” says Rose. “It’s a lot.”

They sit there in silence for a while. Eventually Rose leans over to look at Rey’s laptop screen. “Why’re you scrolling through NHS staff profiles on LinkedIn?”

“It’s nothing,” says Rey. She gets up and goes over to the window, raises a blind and peeks out.

“You’re not still being followed, are you? I thought they arrested the whole cult.”

“They did,” says Rey. “Don’t worry about it.”

Rose eyes her uneasily.

“So!” says Rey with a brightness she does not feel. “Project work! How are we on prototype design?”

*

After Rose leaves, Rey watches the street for a while from her window. Then she grabs her coat and heads downstairs.

She ducks into the greasy spoon across the street and heads straight to the grey-haired man in the last booth, comfortably installed by the window with a plate of eggs and beans. The last time they locked eyes, he was in a paramedic’s uniform and there were 13 floors between them. 

Rey slides into the booth without asking. “If you’re going to eat a full English every morning you spend watching my flat, it’ll be murder on your cholesterol levels.”

Han Solo pops a slice of bacon into his mouth and chews it laconically. “A lot of things have failed to kill me so far, kid. The fry-up is welcome to try. Now, what can I do for you?”

Rey snags the rest of the bacon of his plate. “Take me to him.”

*

That Kylo’s father is American is something of a surprise. Rey watches him guide his pick-up along the M4 with a desultory hand, flipping through radio channels with the other. A pair of gold dice dangle from the rearview mirror.

“Why’d you fake your death?” she asks.

“It was a good time for it,” says Han matter-of-factly. “Things were getting a bit too hot in my line of work. Leia and I needed the break. Felt like guilt-tripping my son too. ‘Course, he figured it out soon enough.”

“How’d you do it?”

“Nope,” says Han. “That’s a family secret you don’t get to hear, kid.” He throws her a sidelong glance. “Yet.”

The pick-up filters towards the exit. “When did you figure it out?” Han inquires.

“You,” said Rey. “At the hospital, when you looked up. You expected to see me. And then I just kept seeing you around. I looked you up at the NHS but I knew I wouldn’t find you there.”

“I was always lousy at following people,” grouses Han. “Ben knows that. Only guy worse at it’s Chewie, on account of how tall he is.” Rey assumes this is the other fake paramedic. “So I guess he must have wanted you to know.”

Rey picks this over in her head as they drive through a quiet suburb. They’re somewhere in Swindon, she thinks. 

“I’m still mad,” she concludes.

“Sure, kid,” says Han agreeably. “It’s Ben. You’ll always be mad at him for something.”

The house looks like any other on the street: white fence, scraggly lawn, ivy festooning the walls. It’s only on the inside that the lie becomes apparent: the hallway is bare, no pictures, no carpet. No appliances in the kitchen except a kettle, from which escapes a curl of steam. No furniture in the living room, although it is full of unmarked crates, wrapped in clear plastic. “Do I - ” begins Rey, eyeing the crates dubiously, and Han says, “Nope, no, you don’t want to know,” and steers her past them towards the stairs.

Rey goes up the stairs. There’s a bedroom with no bed in it, just a mattress and a laptop next to it, charging. She crosses the landing and goes into the next room and -

\- and there he is. Much like the first time she saw him, silhouetted against the light coming through the window. He’s holding a mug of tea, still steaming. His fingers on the sill are restless, tapping in staccato - he’s going through a violin sonata in his head, she thinks she might even know which one, but then he sees her and he freezes and he says, “Rey.”

Rey is across the room before she knows it. Her hand flies up to slap him across the face; he pre-empts this almost absently, catching her wrist, so she punches him in the solar plexus instead. It’s either drop the tea or take the blow, so he does the latter. He doesn’t even flinch.

“How could you,” she begins, nearly in tears already, and then, “Ow, fuck,” because his abdomen might as well be a brick wall.

Kylo sets down the tea and covers her stinging knuckles with his hand. He throws a look over her shoulder, presumably at Han, who says defensively: “Look, you try telling that girl no.”

“I know,” sighs Kylo. To her, he adds: “I was going to tell you.”

“ _When_?” She’s not crying. Really she’s not.

“After the trial started, probably. Once I was sure all of the Order had been brought in - and their allies, too. My mother’s still cleaning house. If all the world was convinced that I was dead, those against her would take liberties, and so lay themselves open. I asked my father to keep an eye on you in the meantime.”

“You’re welcome,” says Han from the door.

Kylo sighs. “Dad. Why are you still here?”

Han throws up his hands in exasperation and stalks off.

“Rey,” Kylo goes on, “if there had been a way to do it without giving you any grief, I would have taken it.”

“You left me,” she whispers. “You left me, and I waited, and I didn’t know how long I’d have to wait for.”

“Why’d you wait?”

“Because it was impossible,” she says fiercely, “it was impossible that you were dead, and you always say that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, whatever remains - ”

“ - whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” Kylo finishes the sentence for her. “It’s something of a fallacy, you know. I have been known to produce fallacies from time to time.”

“But it was true.”

“It was,” he agrees. “This time.”

They’re still holding hands, Rey realises.

“What was that you said, back at the hospital?”

Kylo drops his eyes to their hands. His thumb traces the hollow of her wrist.

“I said I was sorry.”

“No,” says Rey insistently, “before that.”

“I was going to jump off a building right after,” mutters Kylo. “I could have said all manner of crazy things - ”

Rey cups his scarred cheek with her hand and kisses him.

Through the press of her lips on his, she can _still_ hear him thinking - running calculations, scenarios, branching possibilities - and she can feel the moment when he stops, just drops everything else in his head and presses one massive hand into the curve of her spine and _pulls_. Her breath catches hot in her throat. 

Kylo breaks the kiss to press his forehead against hers. They are silent for a handful of seconds, just breathing in tandem. 

“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that,” he says into her ear.

“Why didn’t you?”

“I wasn’t sure about you,” he says. “It was incredibly frustrating, because I’m _always_ sure. It threw me for a loop. You have done, since the beginning.”

Rey doesn’t know what to say to that, to the feeling of her chest being opened up and turned upside down and shaken out for good measure, so she just kisses him again. 

“I kept all your things,” she says some time later. “The police sent them back, but I didn’t unpack them because I didn’t know if you wanted to do it yourself or if I would just have to send them to a charity shop, though god knows what they’d do with a gallon of sulphuric acid and a disturbingly detailed model of the digestive system. You are moving back, aren’t you?”

“Sooner or later.” Kylo seems mesmerised by her freckles, like he’d like to do complex geometry with them. “Probably sooner, because if my dad and I spend any longer in the same house, one of us will have to die all over again.”

“I heard that, kid!” comes a shout from downstairs.

Kylo rolls his eyes, but he’s grinning. It’s such a rare sight, Rey wishes she had a photographic memory too. She’ll just have to settle for making it happen again.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Han Solo, even in this AU, is American. I have a great imagination, but not _that_ great.


	7. The Adventure of the Speckled Carbuncle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My two favourite Sherlock Holmes stories are The Adventure of the Speckled Band (which I now recognise as highly problematic, though so is nearly all Victorian literature today; I just find the poker-bending scene utterly hilarious) and The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (blame it on the goose). I indulge myself by presenting...the Speckled Carbuncle remix!

“I know you,” says the intruder with a sneer. “You’re Kylo Ren, the scoundrel.”

Rey snorts loudly. Both Kylo and their caller turn to look at her. “Don’t mind me,” she says, flipping through her readings. “Carry on.”

“Dr Pryde, is it?” says Kylo blandly. He gestures at an armchair. “Please, take a seat.”

“I know my stepdaughter came here, spouting stories,” snarls Dr Pryde, remaining on his feet. “You stay the hell away from her, and the hell away from my business. I’m a dangerous man to fall foul of.” Abruptly, he seizes the poker from the fireplace and bends it into a misshapen curve. He flings it at Kylo’s feet. “See that you keep yourself out of my grip.”

Kylo sighs and picks up the poker. “Want to see something, Rey?”

“Not particularly,” says Rey. 

Kylo seizes either end of the poker and pointedly straightens the metal with a flourish.

“Weird flex,” says Rey, “but okay.”

“Look here,” begins Dr Pryde, and is distracted by a loud shrieking from behind the door of Kylo’s room. “What the hell is that?”

“Oh, that,” says Kylo, testing the balance of the poker, “you don’t want to fall foul of _that._ ”

Dr Pryde advances towards the bedroom door, which rattles furiously. “What kind of devilry do you keep in there?”

“I really wouldn’t, if I were you,” says Kylo.

Dr Pryde flings open the door.

The goose emerges in a flurry of feathers, squawking like a horde of demons. It hisses and dives towards Dr Pryde, who yells and bats at it, to no avail. 

Kylo opens the front door, grabs Dr Pryde and pushes him through it, then shuts it before the goose can get through. The goose hisses at him. Kylo hisses back.

“Rey,” he yells, “do you mind?”

Rey sighs and slips into the bedroom.

“Anything?”

“It’s a mess in here. I can't breathe for feathers.”

“Hurry up, I can’t keep it distracted for long.”

“Use the poker.”

“Rey!”

“Fine, fine.”

Rey spots a glimmer of blue in a pile of down and droppings and dives for it. “Aha!”

“My brilliant darling,” says Kylo. “Now get out of there.”

Between the two of them, they manage to back the goose back into the bedroom and shut the door on its snapping beak.

“We have got to get it out of there by Sunday,” says Rey. “Before Maz gets back from the country. She’ll have our heads.”

“I’ll think of something,” says Kylo. “Let’s have it then.”

Rey drops the blue jewel into his outstretched hand. “It’s rather pretty.”

“It’s worth five million,” says Kylo. “It had better be pretty.”

“Is it really called a carbuncle? It sounds so grotty. Like something you’d buy a cream at Boots to get rid of.”

“You’re not wrong.” Kylo lifts it to his eye, watches it twinkle. “A carbuncle is a very nasty cluster of boils that, linguistically, derives its name from this very stone. Bizarre, isn’t it, the English language?” He tosses it back to her. “I’m telling Poe that the goose has shat out the Countess’s gem. You’ve got about an hour to play with it before he comes to collect.”

Rey wrinkles her nose. “Think I’ll wash it first. You too, wash your hands, come on.”

They wash the jewel, then their hands, jostling at the tiny sink for room. His hands, which dwarf hers, still have the marks of the poker on his flesh. “Really now,” says Rey severely. “Playing poker with Dr Pryde - who’s he, anyway? - you might as well have arm-wrestled for your masculinity.”

“Stepfather of the young woman with the dead sister who came last morning,” says Kylo briskly, reaching for the tea towel. “Fairly sure he killed her, only need to work out how. And you liked it, really.”

“Wasn’t paying attention. Thermodynamic cycles, positively riveting.”

Kylo slings the tea towel over his shoulder and yanks her to him in one fluid motion. Rey’s breath hitches. “I think you did,” he says, altogether too smug.

“Maybe a bit,” Rey relents, and has the presence of mind to turn off the tap before he kisses her.

“I really,” she says breathlessly ten minutes later, “really do need to finish this module though.”

Kylo lets his head thunk back against the kitchen cabinet with a sigh. “I suppose I’ll just have to entertain myself with unsolved historical mysteries until then. But no rush.”

Rey settles back on the couch with her readings. “Play me something.”

“What would you like?”

She shrugs. “Anything.”

Kylo drops a kiss on her head and goes to pick up his violin. He touches the bow to the strings and begins to play something she could not put a name to, but which she could hum in her sleep. She turns back to her notes and lets the music flow over her, punctuated by the occasional squawk from the goose, in the filmy light of a winter afternoon. 

"That's pretty," she says, as he makes his way to the end of the movement. "You keep playing it these days - what's it called?"

Kylo lets the last note of the violin tremble in the air and fade. "I don't know," he says thoughtfully. "I just call it Rey's Theme in my head."

Rey props her chin on the back of the couch to regard him. "It's a good name. You should keep it."

Kylo looks across at her, limned with the winter light. He reaches out and tips her chin up with his bow. She smiles up at him.

“Excellent,” he says.

“Elementary,” says she.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this has been a lovely adventure trying to slot together a 10-year-old TV series, the 100-plus-year-old stories that inspired it and a relatively new fandom which I have lurked in for far too long before making anything sensible of myself.
> 
> Thank you all for staying with me through this mad AU and especially those who have left kind comments - my blushes, Watson!


End file.
